Exploring the Land of the Long White Cloud

As of tomorrow the GST here is increasing from 12.5% to 15% so all the stores have been pushing sales to "beat the GST rise." So we booked our ferry travel and paid our road user charges this week. The ferries were nearly booked up around the time we want to head South so it was a good thing to get it sorted. On our way back there was a lot of choice but we didn't want to leave it until later. The more decisions we can make up front, the fewer we have to make on the road. And if we learned anything last time, we learned that making heaps of small and large decisions every day wears on tired travellers. So we're on a later ferry going down and a morning ferry coming back. Hopefully one of them will have clear weather because on our previous trip it was a foggy, rainy day so we didn't get to marvel at the scenery. Yeah, since we drive a diesel we pay an extra fee which amounts to about 4 cents per kilometre and it's called road user charges. There isn't as m...

On Sunday afternoon we walked around the Lake Mangamahoe Circuit. It was about an hour and a half to hike it. This lake is only about 15 minutes away and I think it's more of a resevoir and dam for drinking water and power so it's not meant for boating and swimming. But there's nice picnic areas and it's nice and quiet - you can hear the birds singing and even their wings flapping. We figured we were going to get caught in the rain but it held off long enough for us to get back to the car just fine. The water level was so high that the bottom of the bridge was sitting in the lake. Calla lilies grow wild everywhere here! These flowers smell likes onions and then someone saw us looking at them and told us they are called Onion Weeds. We looked them up and they are like spring onions and you can eat them!

There is a big peak just in town so we decided to go hike it on Saturday. First you go up at least a hundred steps and then you hang onto a chain that's been mounted and climb up the rocky bits. It takes about 15-20 minutes to get up. It was a little scary up on the rocky parts because there's no real railings or anything if you lose your balance. But once you're up you can see out over the city! If it was a little bit clearer out it would have been even better. The view from the top Looking over the port and industrial areas towards the city There's our car! How did we get up here? That's the side that we climbed up This is the other side from down on the beach A waterfall on the beach... but then the battery died in the camera...

What a busy day it turned out to be! After making Dustin's lunch and seeing him off to work, I had breakfast and then started some chores. I was just finished cleaning the bathroom when the phone rang from a temp place (one I signed up with last week) for some work. I had all of 30 minutes to shower, make a lunch and walk the 15 minute walk to the office. Since another lady had to come get a timesheet at the office, I hopped a ride with her to the job site. It's a company that manufactures lumber and they also have a construction side. My task was to fill the knot holes with wood filler on finger-jointed beams. It was a long enough day to just do better than break even since I had to get steel-capped boots to work there! haha. But they have lots of different jobs and it sounds like they often call on this agency so hopefully I made a good impression and that they have other work for me down the line! But I've been to work and back and Dustin's still not home - although ...

I spoke too soon about the weather calming down. Many cities are getting record snowfalls - it was snowing about 30 minutes inland from us, snowfall has caused a stadium roof to collapse on the south island (and the stadium was only ten years old apparently), the winds continue and there was a tornado just 15km down the coast the other night. It ripped through a garage but nobody was hurt. Last night I kept waking up and hearing what must be the strongest winds we've had yet - and of course the tornado was on my mind. This morning we woke up to thunder rattling our windows! But the sun has made some appearances today. We seem to chance across these extreme weather events in our travels. What luck! This last week or so of weather has been labelled the worst spring storm for a generation. Farms on the south island have been hit especially hard and most have lost about 15% of their lambs due to the cold and snow or illness caused by it. We were watching the news and they touche...

The winds are almost through! I think just a couple more days with strong winds in the forecast. The storm didn't do much damage up here and it was nice because it wasn't constant rain, just squalls would come through here and there. The wind kept up most of the time though. So I've taken to wearing my hood up everywhere we go and I think Dustin thinks it's weird when it's not raining. But he doesn't have hair long enough for the wind to tangle in an instant - even my bangs get tangled! So a hood or toque it is. I am surprised that Dustin's work wasn't interrupted at all with this weather. I think it was the first day of the wind that he said they were still using a crane! He refused to and kept his distance - the winds were around 60km/h that day I think and he said that at home even if it's about 40km/h they stop cranes. This isn't a high rise crane but still! Well nothing else came up before my Greenpeace interview so I went yesterday afte...

These are the Sugar Loaf Islands just near town. The swell was huge! It might not look big but we're a hundred metres or more from it. The wind was literally making it tough to stand still - you had to keep stepping back or forward to stay balanced. Throwing stuff in the wind is fun!

Some photos from the game on Saturday afternoon. The wind caused a few wayward kicks and the torrential downpour mid-game made the ball slip all over the place but then the sun came out and Taranaki won! They were playing Canterbury who are now behind them by one place in the rankings. We had fun and managed to walk there and back without catching any of the rain. The steam-breathing drivable mascot I don't think the photo does justice to just how much it was raining! Line out Go the 'Naki! (They are the yellow and black team.)

Well in a couple hours I have my very first temp assignment. It's all of four hours! And it's doing stocktake at an electrical supply store. Oh well at least it gets me out of the house. I tried to make some progress with jobs this week and had a couple leads. I signed up with a temping place that does mostly trades work - I really think the guy didn't believe me when I said I'd be willing to do labour on a construction site or be a shovel hand for road work. At least he was nicer than the place that Dustin works for, I dropped by there as well and the guy flat out said "We don't have anything we can put females on until later in December and then we have some spots for people to hold traffic signs." I bit my tongue in repeating some of the things Dustin has said about his co-worker's lack of knowledge and worksmarts and he thinks I'd be a better helper than some of them. Anyways, back to the nice place, they might have a couple days a week packing...

This weekend ranked tops in frustration. But I think that's as far as I'm going to go into it because there's no sense rehashing it all and feeling frustrated all over again. So here were the better parts of the weekend. On Saturday morning we went "Garage sailing" to put together some camping gear and in a town with so much surf, the off-chance that someone's got a board for sale. We got a few camping kitchen items but nothing big. It was a great way to see other areas of the city though and we determined that the free city map we have will suffice because we didn't get lost and we found every garage sale we set out to find. We went into a surf shop and ended up chatting with the owner/shaper for a good while. He is originally from California but has been here for over ten years. So it was interesting to hear his perspective on making a move that big, and different parts of New Zealand. Then we went to the beach and Dustin went out for surf (I stayed...

Just a couple shots from last night and from last week when Dustin went out surfing. Though he's not in the pictures. Looking southwest down the coast

It's about 5kms. It takes about 10 minutes to get there. No traffic jams, no road rage, just smooth sailing and lovely scenery... Yeah we're alpacas, what are you gonna do about it? However, there was an alpaca jam blocking the on ramp to the paddock. Mt. Taranaki from the city

The view from the road up Watch out for the snowball! There was a brief period where the peak was clear from clouds The view back towards town and the ocean - too bad it's so cloudy! This is our vehicle

First off, we are safe and sound. We are very far from the epicentre of the 7.1 earthquake that happened in Christchurch on Saturday. Dustin thinks he heard the windows shake around the time of the quake though but up here it was have been less than a 3.0 I'm guessing. Because Christchurch has so many older buildings, unfortunately the news footage we've seen is pretty sad. It looks like a lot of damage has happened and I think even through last night there was an aftershock nearly every hour! We had a pretty quiet weekend. Dustin worked on Saturday again but of course there was a twist. I was going to drop him off and pick him up but we went out to the car and it didn't start. On Friday Dustin had left the lights on when he got home but I noticed after about 5 minutes and I started the car but didn't think to take it for a drive or anything since it started right away. But overnight I guess the battery slowly went flat. So we had to call a taxi for Dustin to get to w...

It turns out that we have not figured out how to dispose of our garbage yet. Our landlord didn't give us a garbage can the first week and we just stuck the bags outside and only some got picked up. So this week, we put the garbage can out and they took the lid off but didn't take any of it. We had put our recycling into a black garbage bag and that had been picked up. So, I had to contact the district council for information on how it's done. Most of the information I did find on their website but still wasn't clear about the garbage can. The result of this was the other day in the mail we got a two-page letter signed personally by the mayor (it's not even a stamp!) welcoming us to New Plymouth! Included with the letter was all sorts of brochures and information about the city! That was kind of cool. Plus the question of garbage pick up was answered: we are just supposed to put a garbage bag out, not the can for health and safety reasons. And the recycling should be...

So, unwittingly, last night I put New Plymouth to the friendliness test. I went out to get some groceries and accidentally left the car lights on! There's no warning alarm beep so I didn't notice they were on. I was in there maybe about fifteen minutes and came out to a flat battery. I had left the phone at home - which may not have helped much anyways since between Dustin and I there's only one phone and one vehicle. I asked someone if they had jumper cables but they didn't. I walked across to a gas station and they didn't have any either, but they really wanted to help there. I walked to another gas station and the guy went digging through the back room to find the jumper cables, even though they had some for $40 and he could have easily just suggested I buy them. He didn't even ask for a deposit or anything and I walked back to the car park. I asked two people for a jump - one said he was in a hurry and the others had one of those Toyota Hiace vans and it was...